Lobbydog...

Friday, 16 April 2010

Shirts slip off them. People hang them on door handles. They bend when you hang jeans on them. They flick off rails. They join together in pairs. They gaggle in dodgy, tinny, wiry orgies, tingling nastily. They have a static sneer. Have you ever actually seen anybody buy them? Who even sells them? Do they just appear in your wardrobes? They seem to have a near endless domestic omnipresence.

Not only a waste of wire, but a waste of time. How often have you had to re-hang things on them? Or perhaps Re-iron shirts after being bent ruthlessly shapeless thereon? Then they spin of the rail and onto the floor. You kick them and then get wrapped around your foot, or sibling. And then if you can find a bin that will fit such a stupidly angular object, the sadistic little sharp corner on the hook rips the bag and there it is again, escaped. What a malicious little sod.Let's face it, the only use for metal coat hangers is to unravel them and make them into something else.Therefore, it is proposed that all wire coat hangers should be systematically hung, drawn and unravelled, under the 1936 Public Order Act.

Standing outside the small bungalow on the outskirts of a Stoke on Trent housing estate your humble blogger was becoming more and more frustrated.

I had knocked on the door and the window several times but no one had answered, yet I knew there was someone in there – I could hear voices and even laughter.

I wouldn’t normally keep bothering people if I thought they didn’t want to answer. But the owner of the property, a BNP politician, had not installed a door bell and I couldn’t be sure he had heard me knock. But he had.

From behind the glass panel door I saw a light-ish coloured figure approaching, and then it dawned on me – “Good lord, this man is going to answer the door naked.”

A seething Councillor Anthony Simmonds pulled open the door dressed only a very diminutive pair of blue briefs.

So shocked I was, that I did not have a chance to say who I was before he growled “can’t you see I’m busy!”

I could now. I knew meeting the BNP would be revealing, but not this revealing.

Meanwhile the former chair of Stoke Central Constituency Labour Party is standing as an independent after quitting in protest at the “fix” which saw TV historian Tristram Hunt take the candidacy.

Gary Elsby (above) said quitting Labour and standing against it after decades of membership was a hugely difficult decision.

He said it was one he felt bound to take when he saw the lives of people in Stoke become pawns in the chess game being played between various figures at the top of the party.

He believes Stoke Central was given to the Blairite faction of the party in return for other safe seats being handed to Balls’ union boys and Harman’s all women shortlist brigade.

But it was really only the final straw by the sounds of it. Elsby said that Stoke residents had been paying taxes but for years had been given little in return compared to other places.

“We are only just starting to get regeneration here. We’re only just getting Building Schools for the Future going. If I’m honest we haven’t really achieved anything here in the last five years,” he said.

If the chair of the constituency party felt that way, I wonder how many other Labour people in the city do too.

Yesterday BNP Deputy Leader Simon Darby was talking to Lobbydog about unemployment in Stoke on Trent.

Darby, standing in Stoke Central, said young people today couldn’t get jobs so easily because of the competition from immigrants.

The BNP’s policies – freezing immigration, sending illegal immigrants home and pulling out of the EU – would, he claimed, create opportunities.

That line may appeal to some, I replied, but what about ‘those’ communities that were legally here already – how would he deal with them?

Darby moved the conversation specifically to Muslim communities and the issue of “power breeding”.

“There is a problem with the Islamic community. They are power breeding,” he said.

“They are deliberately having more kids to take over the country. They are using demographics and benefits to deliberately fill the country. That’s a problem that needs addressing.”

But how, I asked, do you ‘address’ such a problem?

“First it needs to be discussed. We have to have a chat with the Islamic Community and say we know what you are up to and it’s got to stop,” he replied.

LD’s contacts are good, but I admit even I do not have a number for ‘the Islamic community’.

Let’s say for a minute, I asked, that the country turned around tomorrow and said ‘you’re right, you’ve been the most forward thinking on this, we need to deal with it, what’s your plan?’

“In the same way that the tax and benefits system encourage this, people having more and more kids, it could be used inversely to turn it round.

“People may call me a racist for that, but if you look at the demographics it’s startling.”

So the tax and benefits system could effectively be used to penalise those Islamic families that have ‘too many’ kids.

The BNP also has a housing policy of giving priority to the children of ‘local’ people who already live on an estate when handing out social housing.

On its own the housing policy sounds reasonably innocent, it is sold as a scheme to keep families together. But added to the anti-power breeding policy a more daunting picture emerges.

After all if Islamic couples cannot have many kids, and if council houses go to the kids of those already living in council houses, then wont the effect be to slowly ‘de-islamify’ council estates – isn’t that ethnic cleansing?